Led Zeppelin Discuss Vikings, Sex and Hobbits With David Letterman

Well, we lost that bet. Like most people, we assumed that when Led Zeppelin showed up for a 'Late Show with David Letterman' interview last night (Dec. 3), John Paul Jones would sit quietly in the furthest chair as Robert Plant did most of the talking. Instead, the eternally underrated Jones took the lead and basically charmed the pants off the studio audience.

As the group made their entrance, Plant seemingly called an audible to the planned seating order, grinning mischievously and taking the furthest chair, prompting guitarist Jimmy Page to shoot him an amused "what the f----?" look as he took the middle chair, leaving Jones in the lead position. (And yes, we just wrote an entire paragraph about the order in which Led Zeppelin sat down.)

The bassist immediately proved he was up to the task, brightening up the discussion of the band's recent Kennedy Center Honors presentation with a dry sense of humor, then delivering a perfect and brief non-verbal answer when asked by the host to describe Zeppelin's music.

As Plant enthused at one point, "I tell you what... it's very handy having John Paul Jones nearest the host. I've never heard him say so much in his life!"

When Letterman recalled the speech Tenacious D frontman Jack Black delivered for the group at the ceremony -- "Your music was about sex, was about vikings, was about vikings having sex" -- Jones was quick to correct him: "You missed the bit about vikings having sex with hobbits."

As expected, the trio did not perform any music, and Page turned reflective when asked if the group ever considered carrying on after the death of drummer John Bonham in 1980: "There was no way with the amount of work and mutation that had gone on with those songs, that we could say to another drummer, 'could you learn this bit and learn that bit?,' it just wouldn't work."